


nothing more than what the losers settle for

by friendly_ficus



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Time Travel, a self-indulgent fic, attempts are made for a fix-it but the results are inconclusive, not the angst and time travel you were thinking of, the ‘let’s kill trent’ train has left the station and i am on it, writing this was incredibly satisfying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2019-10-25 23:29:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17734724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: Trent Ikithon is the kind of man with plans upon plans; time travel rarely factors into them.(Unfortunately, his death unravels the stars.)





	1. we've been thrown off our track

**Author's Note:**

> This is more a series of moments than a coherent fic, but I love time travel so much I couldn’t help myself. Basically, each member of the Nein kills Trent because he’s the Worst: A collection of scenes in alternate timelines. (And yes, I’m referencing Starkid in the titles. The song is about time travel. It was too good to pass up.)

  The dodecahedron was, in _hindsight,_ incredibly dangerous. Not just in the ‘both the Empire and Xhorhas want this thing back’ way that they’d all considered, but also in a ‘changing fate for fun and profit’ context. Beau remembers the angry buzz of it filling the tunnel, the thin fissures of light in the surface before it just _exploded,_ tearing through the stone and the caverns and the Mighty Nein.

  She woke up here completely alone, face-down in an alley behind some generic-as-fuck tavern in some cliche small town. After a few tries at finding the rest of the Nein (all of which failed) Beau realized another problem. Y’know, because waking up in a completely unfamiliar town in the Dwendalian Empire without her friends wasn’t enough. The thing is, no one here has mentioned the war. No one here walks around with that extra tension in their shoulders, and the Crownsguard are suspiciously not-suspicious.

  Listen, Beau’s never claimed to be the genius of the group but she can put it together. The dodecahedron gives you the little light, and the light lets you rewind time a little bit. Not a lot, but enough to fix one mistake. So when it exploded and a _whole lot of light_ hit the group...

  Well, she’s here now. She’s just gonna have to deal with it.

\---

  The Dairon she finds is younger than the one she knows, but not _young._ Probably already part of the good ol’ Cobalt Soul, if the blue accents on her cloak are anything to go by. Not as polished as the mentor Beau remembers - that Dairon could’ve blended into any crowd, and this one still moves like a monk when no one’s looking. Beau’s always looking, though.

  (She’s looking for Jester and Fjord and Caleb and Nott and Yasha and Caduceus, but there hasn’t been much luck on that front. So far she’s got a snippet of a song about the Ruby of the Sea, a random mushroom that’s kinda pink, and absolutely nothing of value. Nothing except for the fact that the Archmage of Civil Influence has taken up a teaching post at the Soltryce Academy.

  Look, the world’s all wrong and fucked up and she doesn’t belong here - but killing Trent Ikithon still feels like a pretty good idea. At least then she’d be doing _something._ )

  Beau’s skills are sharp, and she’s quickly been building a reputation in the Zadash underground. She gets things done quickly, doesn’t ask too many question, and is completely willing to beat the shit out of the majority of the population. Oh, and she _really likes a certain shade of blue._

  Dairon’s been shadowing her for, what, almost a week? Going through her few possessions in her room at the Leaky Tap, watching her on the street, just generally being around. Beau’s been gradually stepping up her taunts too, a sash hanging from her waist _here,_ her cloak worn blue-side-out _there,_ and the kicker: the stitching on her belt turned outward for anyone to see. _You don’t know me,_ she’s saying, _but I know you, and I know what you do. Come and get me._

  It sorta ruins the effectiveness of Dairon dropping down into the alley she’s cutting through; it would’ve been pretty damn spooky if Beau hadn’t known the moment was coming. The strike to her throat is familiar, and she doesn’t fight as Dairon hits a series of pressure points. (She thinks of Avantika and the Plank King, of a minute of truth but even more knuckles, and. She waits.)

  “Who are you,” Dairon demands coldly, and truth flows from Beau like it’s fuckin’ _wine._

  “I’m Beauregard, an Expositor for the Cobalt Soul.” She can’t help the smirk that twists her mouth, can’t help savoring the feeling that for the first time since she came back _she’s_ the one with the information.

  Dairon is evidently a little younger and more hotheaded than she thought, because the elf hauls off and punches her in the face.

  “Try again,” she orders.

  Beau can put up with a lot, okay? She’s used to being thought of as a liar, dishonest down to her bones. But really, when she’s telling the truth, there’s only so many punches to the face she wants to deal with. (Zero, in fact, is how many punches to the face she wants to deal with.)

  So she stays silent, watching Dairon watch her, seeing the way the other monk begins to move - and this time, she dodges and hits _back._

  So, they fight. And Dairon growls out questions between blows, and Beau dodges and answers and returns the hits with things she learned from Dairon and Tubo years in the future until she can land that perfect stunning strike.

  “We are not kind,” Beau spits angrily, wiping blood from her mouth, “we are truth. I am part of the Cobalt Soul and what I know, I know because _you taught me.”_

  Her wrist is aching, sprained or worse, and she can feel the hot pulse of new bruises forming on her torso. Dairon’s already so good at fighting her, pulling forward the memory of the warehouse and Xeenoth and the only other time Beau has seen the woman face to face.

  “All of my friends aren’t my friends yet. I can’t prove anything outright. But there’s a problem that needs dealing with, and I can’t do it by myself. Will you help me,” Beau asks, without any of the tact Fjord’s been teaching her, with only the weight of the truth to give her words value.

  Dairon, breathing heavily and sporting a dislocated shoulder, nods. Beau sees that fire in her eyes, the same fire that was present years later when she was just some asshole and Dairon was this powerhouse of a monk.

  “This is a problem the system cannot deal with, isn’t it.” It’s not a question.

  Beau finds herself grinning, satisfaction sharp in her veins.

  Dairon nods again.

\---

  The delegation from the Cobalt Soul arrives at the Soltryce Academy with little fanfare. It’s unusual, but not unheard of for the archivists to need information on arcane matters in order to understand the historical context of some event or another. The small group of people in blue robes cross the threshold, flanked by guards.

  There are only five of them, just Beau and Dairon and a few favors Dairon had been able to call in, hardly enough for an invading force. But the Cobalt Soul doesn’t _do_ ‘invading forces’ anyway. They’re far better suited to clandestine operations - hell, they’d been able to secure this invitation through a spy working within the Academy.

  (Even then, it took _months,_ months of training and sparring and doing more small-time jobs for the monks around Zadash. Months with nobody but Dairon to watch her back and no one to help her watch Dairon’s. It’s a long time - long enough for Beau to watch the monk who went behind enemy lines from Bladegarden pull a few stunts that almost remind her of herself. It’s also long enough to get a few new scars and hone her edges to a cutting sharpness, to become even more of a badass. Trent Ikithon would be ready for blades or magic, but Beau’s weapons are her fists and they can’t be dispelled.)

  The group splits at the great doorway of the main building, the three more officious types entering the building while Beau and Dairon stop and start making conversation with the guard stationed there.

  (“It’s called Dunamancy,” Beau briefed them on the journey to the school, “It’s a Xhorhasian school of magic. At least, they know it in Xhorhas. I don’t think they’re gonna keep the books about it on a shelf for anyone to take a look at.”

  “We have a tendency to get into things people don’t want us to find,” Dairon had reminded her. “I have every faith that if there is something to be found, they will find it.”)

  After ten minutes of mind-numbingly boring conversation, Dairon adopted a shocked expression, gaping at something behind the guard. Her voice stumbles over the end of her sentence, sounding like she’s truly afraid. When the guard turns around to address it, he sees nothing at all. When he turns back to face the monks, there’s nobody there.

  (“‘Hey, look behind you’ is the _best_ plan you can come up with?” Dairon’s tone was... to call it skeptical would be very generous.

   “I mean, I’ve done more with less,” Beau replied, thinking of fire giants and a river of glowing magma. “I’m pretty fast.”)

  The two of them don’t necessarily have a lot of time before the alarm is raised, so they make tracks for Ikithon’s office. Fortunately, they know where it is. Unfortunately, he’s not alone when they get there.

\---

  Dairon can handle herself just fine, can handle a couple students even if they’re tossing fire and acid and ice at her. It’s good that she can keep them busy, can tackle an unfamiliar boy into the adjoining room and draw the other two after them. Caleb’s face was twisted in anger and the girl beside him snapped out an order, but Beau can read a fight pretty well and these kids aren’t going to be able to work as a well-oiled machine. Dairon was too good at knocking people off balance to be put off by three teens trying to fight in the big leagues.

   _And I don’t want to kill them,_ Beau thought as she faced the man sitting calmly behind his desk, _not like I want to kill you._ The picture window behind him looked out over another peaceful, productive day at the Soltryce Academy. _What a shitty place._

  Trent Ikithon is an Archmage, one of the most powerful magic users in the entire Empire, and an enemy no one wants to make. He can cast spells she’s never even dreamed of, could twist her flesh from her bones if he so desired. He’ll do it, too, if she lets him - all it takes is a thought, and he’s easily strong enough to do it.

  But Beau’s fast. And Beau’s smart. And Beau’s been training for eight solid months with the sole purpose of killing the wizard in front of her, and the antimagic field he throws up around himself isn’t gonna do shit to stop her.

  She launches across his desk and brings her staff around for a hit that lands _perfectly_ at the junction between neck and shoulder, disrupting the spell he’d been preparing and sending ripples of disorientation through the archmage’s body.

  For a moment, she wants to draw it out, wants to say something witty as she stands over his stunned body, wants to let him try to get up. The urge passes, though, because she can’t waste this one opportunity the whole dodecahedron clusterfuck has given her.

  Beau brings the end of her staff down on his fragile skull and watches it cave in. She saves her curses until she’s sure he’s dead.

  “Fuck you, man.”

\---

  The sound of spellcasting has faded from the other room, and Dairon steps back into the office proper, barely sparing a glance for Ikithon’s crumpled body.

  “The kids, are they-”

  “Just unconscious.”

  “Got it. So we need to get the others and get out of here, because I killed-”

  The words die in Beau’s throat as she catches another glimpse out the window. What looks like crackles of black lightning criss-cross the sky outside and the day is rapidly growing dim. There’s a moment where she just watches, transfixed, as the sky _twists_ and breaks like a windowpane.

  A void of black emptiness replaces it, shot through with a few pale strands like lines of starlight. The world around Beau shudders and _heaves_ and is swallowed up - nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Matt released those notes and my hatred of Trent Ikithon was so powerful that I was moved to write this fic. This was Beau’s chapter, and I think it turned out pretty good!  
> Please don’t ask me when exactly each of these happen (like in-game years) because I am not good at figuring things like that out. Some of the timelines will be off, but these chapters are more for just having fun with the idea of time travel. Sorry that it... doesn’t work.  
> A note on chapters: Caduceus doesn’t have one in this fic, not because I have any sort of problem with him, but because I had absolutely no clue what steps he would take in any kind of time travel situation. I honestly don’t know if he would try to change the past, and I’m still trying to figure him out. Maybe someday I’ll go back and write one for him, but for now that’s not in the cards.  
> Next time: I haven’t figured out the order of these yet besides beginning with Beau and ending with Caleb, so it’ll be either Nott, Jester, Fjord, or Yasha.  
> I hope you enjoyed this, since there’s a bit more to come! Leave a comment and let me know what you think!


	2. without a beginning to start it all

_ This is an opportunity,  _ Nott tells herself, when she wakes alone by the river in Felderwin with the memory of the Beacon shattering in the forefront of her mind. The tree she spoke to the rest of the Nein under is only a sapling in the ground, barely taller than herself. The landscape around her is jarringly familiar and entirely alien, a clock that’s been wound backwards - a boulder rests in the water upriver, rising more out of the water than she remembers it. Nott is cataloguing it all, taking every detail in horrific clarity as her mind works in overdrive. The weight of her flask is in her hand before she even considers it but - not right now. Later, not right now. 

_ This is an opportunity,  _ she repeats as she weaves a disguise spell over herself, not Veth but some other amalgamation of halfling traits. The sound of the river is loud in her ears, but she turns her feet in the direction of town and starts walking. 

  It hits her like a blow to the chest, how much she misses them, like her ribs caving in and shredding her heart. The absence of voices talking around her and the lack of a cart to carry her with them -  _ This is an opportunity. It has to be. _

\---

  Felderwin cements the fact that she is back in time, somehow. (The Beacon, dunamancy,  _ Caleb did you know this could happen,  _ her mind races, putting pieces together. It’s a different kind of alchemy compared to what she’s used to - figuring this out isn’t like mixing acid, even in the back of a moving cart. This is much more of a mystery, and Nott is missing her fellow detective like a limb.)

  Yeza is a young halfling right now, and Veth might be with him. Maybe it’s the day of their first kiss, maybe it’s early in their friendship-turned-courtship, maybe they don’t understand each other yet at all. Or, he’s running around with a group of children and she’s hiding in a hayloft somewhere, hoping that no one finds her. The point is that Yeza is alive right now, not tangled up with the Cerberus Assembly or Xhorhas or anything else dangerous; the point is that Luke is  _ not  _ alive, not born yet, her son, her  _ boy- _

  Nott spends a while wandering her hometown, taking in the sight of it untouched by war and before that hard winter forced a lot of downsizing. The people here are, if not happy, at least content. It’s strange to see this with the eyes of a grown woman, to understand what feuds in the marketplace will be smothered by the threat of starvation and illness and war. The past is strangely small and stifling, constricting something in her lungs.

  Plans, she needs plans and priorities and some kind of objective, some way to get back to her people. She owes them, owes them for going into Xhorhas in the first place, for chasing Yeza down with her. She’s invested a lot of time and money into the group and leaving it behind would be a waste, they’re stronger together and the world is a dangerous place to wander alone -  

  None of those explanations is the truth, is the thing. The truth is that Nott wants to get back to the Mighty Nein because they are her friends and she loves them. (Yasha is distant but Xhorhas is clearly unnerving her, Fjord is an ass and he needs her there to push back, Beau still doesn’t understand how to treat people with kid gloves, Jester burns like a comet in the sky but she needs Nott there to support her and Caleb is  _ so close  _ to understanding people sometimes but he’s not there yet - well, Caduceus will probably be fine without her but sometimes he can be a little slow to catch on to important matters, so he really should have someone around to point things out.)

  So she lurks in the shadows of Felderwin for a few days trying to put her head together and missing her friends more than she could have anticipated, stranded apart from the rest of the world as it turns on and on around her. Whenever she tries to make a coherent plan the thoughts skitter around uselessly in her head; there are too many possibilities and despite being smart enough to recognize that, she has no idea where to begin.

  (There’s Avantika, somewhere out there, and Jester’s Lord Something-something and Beau’s family and Duce’s cemetery and Caleb’s whole thing, and Nott can’t decide if she should start solving those problems or just say “fuck it,” get drunk, and go try to slaughter the whole goblin clan in the forest near Felderwin.) 

  It’s a coincidence, that gets her to stop making vials of acid in the back alleys and scrawling plans in the dirt and going around in circles in her head. It’s a snippet of conversation between two Crownsguard - the one on the left is boasting proudly about a little cousin who just got into the Soltryce Academy.

  “... Archmage Ikithon himself has taken up a post at the Academy, you know. It’s very prestigious-”

  “Enough about this, Geoff, looks like there’s a disturbance on the other side of the square.”

  The disturbance is, in fact, Nott pressing a spell around a town resident who now believes he is aflame. She needs to think, she needs the guards to just  _ go away and let her think,  _ and it’s the first thing that comes to mind - no lasting harm, at least. She’s landed in lava before, this isn’t a particularly  _ nice  _ thing to do but she’s unbothered.

  Trent Ikithon, Caleb’s anguished face, the scars on his arms - 

_ This is an opportunity. _

\---

  Nott doesn’t waste any more time in Felderwin. She loads up on supplies and crossbow bolts and starts walking in the direction of Rexxentrum, camping when she can along the way. She’s got money, stays in inns when available but doesn’t really care about the muck of traveling. 

  She dreams of them, of the silhouette of Caduceus driving the cart, of Jester’s laugh as her weasel does a trick, of shooting birds on a beach outside of Nicodranas. It hurts. It hurts, but she is going to take care of this and find a way back to them.

  (It feels like she’s going to spend the rest of her life trying to get back to people. Well, it could be worse - she could be dead.)

  She fiddles with her crossbow and her crossbow bolts, knowing how to make explosive bolts is all well and good but Nott created a truly absurd amount of acid during her planning days and she’s curious about combining the two. The acid has to be contained in glass so it doesn’t dissolve the bolt, and the glass has to be small enough to be fireable from the crossbow, but she’s got weeks on the road to figure it out. By the end of it, Nott has a collection of bolts more deadly than she’s ever had before. She knows she’ll need them deadly, for him.

  The walls of the Soltryce Academy are patrolled by guards, but that schedule can be learned with enough observation. Nott can wait, can think, can’t afford any distractions. She puts the flask away again. ( _ I need it,  _ something in her gut howls, but she shoves the urge down.  _ Later. Not right now. _ )

  Trent Ikithon has only recently taken up a personal teaching post at the Soltryce Academy, and the Academy is still a school. Sure, they teach kids how to kill enemies of the Empire, but she’s relying on the fact that the students are still  _ kids.  _

_ A prank,  _ she imagines Jester saying,  _ is not as suspicious as a trap. _

  Nott breaks into his office and steals everything that isn’t nailed down. Not just the shiny things, not just the interesting-looking books, everything. The room is bare except for the larger furniture pieces, and even then she steals the cushions from the chair. 

  Trent hasn’t chosen his personal students yet, but the files in the locked desk drawer are easily proof that he is going to. Unacceptable.

\---

  Archmage Ikithon comes looking for his things, finds them haphazardly stacked in a shadowed storage room. She’d assumed that he could use magic to do that somehow, remembered the deck of Avantika’s ship and Vera tracing glyphs in the air, the desperation in Caleb’s eyes as he carved a wall of orange-red fire across the deck. She hadn’t even moved the things off the campus, just a few floors away. No one has used this storage room in a long while, if the dust present is any indication.

  Nott is going to make it into a tomb.

  Trent walks through the threshold, casting globes of light into the air. He’s a suspicious man, analytical, but in the heart of the Empire and without the threat of war even he has let his guard slip slightly. When the first crossbow bolt comes whizzing out of the dark he throws up a shield spell, but Nott knows that trick. She knows a lot of wizard tricks. And she’s a better shot than he’s anticipating, because the bolt sinks through his palm and pins him to the wall.

  Acid bolts thud into his torso, as fast as she can fire them. The smell of his flesh burning takes her back to the goblin clan, to Yeza running off with Luke, to dumping a vial on the face of the worst creature she’s ever known.

  Nott empties the Tinkertop Bolt Blaster, and the Archmage of Civil Influence dies.

\---

  She’s curling another disguise spell around her form and walking calmly from the room when she sees it happening, sees the color draining away from the world around her. Rich tapestries on the walls are dulled and growing duller, torches burn seemingly without producing light. The world goes gray and ghostly and silent. Nott keeps walking.

  A crack of black lightning  _ slams  _ through the stone corridor in front of her, destroying support columns. Absolutely no noise is produced, even when Nott begins to swear. Glancing back, she sees another bolt. And another, and another.

  Every muscle in her body goes tense with agony as gravity itself shifts, dragging her into the crackling nothingness of the energy. All around her, the Soltryce Academy crumbles, metal warping and moving in ways it shouldn’t. 

  The void pulls Nott in and the world is pulled with her until - nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, Nott went about it in a different way but the required Archmage-killing still occurred. Since she’s not part of a faction (that we know of) like Beau is, she didn’t have a group to turn to for support. Everything in this chapter also happened on a much faster timetable, since Nott didn’t spend a bunch of time training. She basically landed in the past, figured out what to do over the course of a week, then traveled and did it. This also occurred earlier in the canon timeline, since Caleb et. al hadn’t been officially recruited yet.  
> Next time: Either Jester, Fjord, or Yasha.  
> I hope you liked this chapter! Let me know what you think with a comment - this fic is mostly just an excuse to come up with elaborate ways to kill Trent Ikithon and I hope people other than me are enjoying it.


	3. choke the weed before it grows

  Yasha did not mean for this to happen, whatever  _ this  _ is. Returning to Xhorhas is already complicated - saving Nott’s husband is, of course, worth it. It’s just very difficult, harder than she thought it would be to cross back into the lands she lived with Zuala in. She, well, she doesn’t have enough flowers in her book yet, and she isn’t even sure where the grave is and she doesn’t know if she can kill the tribe or if she wants to and. And.

  (It is different, to return to your country knowing that your wife is not there any longer. It is complicated, knowing that there will be the same harsh environment but no teasing grin, no voice asking if you’re sure you can eat that whole fox. It is complicated, it is difficult, it is painful.)

  She does not have to confront it, not yet, because the Beacon shakes and groans in her hands, cracking open and pouring out light that tangles around the group for one blazing moment - and everything is gone.

  She wakes on the lakeshore in Trostenwald, damp from the mist in the air. It is a gray day, the distant sky one mass of clouds. Perhaps, if she strains her ears, there is an echo of thunder in the air.

\---

  The people in Trostenwald are wary of her, but it’s not the right wariness. The extra suspicion is missing; they dislike that she is foreign, that she carries a large sword, that she looms and rarely speaks, but they are not worried that she is an agent of war. This is the first indication that something has changed.

  (Yasha has had this happen before, this waking up in a new place with no memory of traveling there. The Stormlord woke her from something at an altar, years ago. She still wonders what she sacrificed there.)

  Years are gone, not missing from her memories but missing from everyone else. She sees the lawmaster from a distance, the faces of the guards who arrested the Fletching and Moondrop company so long ago. Will arrest them, in a few years, when Kylre goes all strange. 

_ Mollymauk is alive,  _ she realizes, watching a windchime blow in the wind from where it hangs on an apothecary’s sign.  _ Mollymauk is alive, does that mean. Does that mean - how far back am I? _

  Yasha walks out of Trostenwald, as the wind picks up and the sky grows heavy with the promise of a storm.

_ Zuala. _

\---

  She roams the countryside, gradually working her way towards the mountains. She does not have a way to cross the peaks yet, with no large worm burrowing across the border, but that does not matter. Yasha survived a childhood in Xhorhas, she can survive the Ashkeeper Peaks. She does not stop. She does not think. Her movements are almost mindless.

  She says a prayer to the Stormlord for guidance one night, like she has a hundred times before, and the clouds crack open.

  Yasha has endured worse weather, but this storm twists around her like a living thing. The wind roars around her, twisting her hair into her eyes. Lightning hits the ground once, twice, close enough for her to smell the burn in the air. She keeps walking.

  A figure watches her in the shape of the dark sky, testing, evaluating. 

  That night, Yasha does not rest. She sees strange things, afterimages of herself and her tribe and Zuala, of Molly and the circus, of Jester and Fjord and Caleb and Nott and Beau. Sometimes they watch her. Sometimes they attack.

  It is a test, a lesson - the Stormlord is learning her, learning how far she will go, how much she will endure. Bleeding, chest heaving with exertion, Yasha wields her fury like a weapon and fights on.

  When the dawn breaks through, an eternity later, she feels a distant sense of approval. She does not know where she is, what forest she has come to, but a huge tree lies felled by the storm. The edges of the trunk are hot enough to sizzle under the gentle rain, but it beckons her.

  Yasha curls up in the lightning-struck heart of the fallen tree, and sleeps. 

\---

  She dreams in fragments, shards of conversation.

  “She’s the charm,” Mollymauk says with a smile to the ragtag group. Beauregard collapses into her arms, when the mechanical warden is beaten into fragments. Nott the Brave offers her a flower for her book and she presses it in a page near the four leaf clover. Fjord flails in the bath house, sinking in the fragrant water with a smile as Jester laughs. Caduceus, sleep in his eyes and nose wrinkled against the smell of burnt hair, pats her shoulder as the ship creaks around them.

  Her own blade in her hands, glinting under the orbs of light as she crouches down, trying to be careful and delicate. 

  “This means we are friends,” Caleb Widogast whispers into the night.

\---

  This is not a rebirth. That is not what the Stormlord offers her. When Yasha wakes, her muscles ache and the bruises on her body have not vanished. She is smeared with soot from the tree and there is dried blood on her face, on her hands, in her hair.

  But she is alive, still. She has been tested by her god, has proven that she can endure and endure and endure a little more. Can pick her blade back up and keep fighting.

  She scrubs off in a freezing creek, keeping her sword close at hand. The sky has calmed, but Yasha no longer has a sense of where she is. That won’t be a problem for long - the Empire is full of flat stretches of land, and once she sees the mountains again it will not be difficult to get an idea of the direction she needs to head in. 

  Trent Ikithon is a coincidence, in this story.

\---

  Yasha doesn’t find a stretch of empty land, but she does find a path twisting through the trees. It’s clearly not often traveled; there are no wagon treads, and in places the dirt is overtaken by grass from the forest nearby. 

  She hears the voices long before she sees them, walking as silently as she is. Deciding to avoid contact, Yasha ducks into a thicker patch of underbrush and young trees.

  She does not expect to see Caleb walking down a forest path in the middle of nowhere. He looks... light. Lighter than she’s ever seen him. There are dark circles under his eyes, but he goes back and forth with a girl in rapid Zemnian, the other boy with them interjecting a few times but remaining mostly quiet. He’s... young. Clearly not a child, but then, Yasha’s idea of childhood might be a little skewed. The three of them are in matching robes, some kind of uniforms.

_ Zuala,  _ she thinks,  _ I could go another way. _ Resisting curiosity, however, is not a skill she has ever tried to obtain. She waits until they are out of sight and goes the opposite way, looking for the place they came from.

  This is just a stop on the way. And if she finds something, does something to help Caleb then that’s. It’s serendipity. Friends help each other, and they  _ are  _ friends.

\---

  Yasha did not intend for this to happen, this trudging up the forest path, this falling backwards in time. She thinks of Caleb, hunched in the back of the cart outside Felderwin, and feels that familiar cold rage stir in her chest. There’s a static taste in the back of her mouth, as she comes upon the house.

 The house itself is not particularly opulent, a couple stories high. The clearing it’s in seems like a peaceful place. Yasha understands brutality, though, and she knows that it can hide under whatever veneer it likes. 

  (Caleb had been shaking, had unwound the bandages from his arms, had thrown up in the basement. His eyes went blank sometimes after he pulled fire from the air. Even after she ran her greatsword across his face without drawing a speck of blood, he did not trust her. This man did that to him.)

  Flowers bloom outside of the Archmage’s home, seeming out of place in the moment. They’re growing well - but then, Yasha’s sure there are plenty of bodies buried for them to feed on. She does not stop to gather any just now. Perhaps she’ll come back.

  It’s nice that the students aren’t around. It’s better that they’re off carrying out whatever task they’ve been set to, better than if they’d been here. They don’t need to see this.

  Yasha does not call herself Orphan-Maker any longer, but her anger is still something to behold.

\---

   It turns out to be a shame that she didn’t pick any of the flowers, because the fight sets them burning. Yasha rages and bleeds and Trent Ikithon hurls magic at her, chaining together destruction and fear and mind-bending spells. She bleeds and bleeds and endures. His power tries to sink into her mind but she shakes it away, the coldness of her anger pushing his influence out.

  Trent twists his hands and mutters something and a bolt of lightning shoots from his outstretched hand, burning five feet wide and a hundred feet deep into the forest. Yasha is caught in the blast and the power makes her teeth rattle in her skull, electricity making her blood burn and her muscles go taut with pain. It’s a finishing move if there ever was one, but Yasha has been tried and tested by the Stormlord himself. An Archmage has nothing in the face of that lightning.

  There is no hesitation in her movement, in the swing of her greatsword. The color bleeds away from her eyes and the ends of her hair as skeletal shadows shoot from her back in a mockery of wings. She looks like a monster out of some nightmare. In battle she is cruel and efficient, and her strikes cut flesh and break bone.

  Yasha sees the moment he decides to run. The lightning has not set the forest ablaze, thanks to the heavy storm the night before but Trent’s own fire is curling around the house, slowly burning against whatever arcane protections he has on the dwelling. He is shaping a spell in his hands that she does not recognize, but he  _ must not leave this place. _

  The sword in her hands responds, tiny runes inscribed along the blade lighting up with energy. The blade is a relic from a past age and it hums in her grip, answers her call. It is the Magician’s Judge and she is an executioner - this is a relationship that it understands in a very basic way. The energy of Trent’s spell dissipates and he looks briefly surprised.

  Yasha cleaves his ribcage in two.

\---

  A shockwave billows out when his corpse falls to the ashy ground, and for a moment Yasha watches in the flames around the house as flowers grow, wilt, decompose, grow again. She blinks and the forest is gone, and the forest is struggling up out of the dirt, and the trees tower above her. Streaks of black lightning race across the sky, but she doesn’t feel the presence of the Stormlord here.

  Oh. The clouds part and the sun spins across the sky like a runaway chariot, and the moon chases it, and the world groans and shakes. Trent’s body decays, decomposes, turns to dust.

  Like fishhooks, like some kind of spiked chains, the black energy grips the fabric of everything and  _ tears  _ at it. The world goes away.

  Yasha sees a thousand echoes of herself, all stretching out in the sudden darkness. Lines of white thread shoot through the space around her. The whole tapestry she has found herself in  _ shivers,  _ like someone’s plucking at the threads.

  And then - nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, Yasha had some shit to do. She was even going to go and do it! This was a side mission! If this was a story about going back and fixing whatever problems each character encountered in their backstory, that maybe would have happened. It was interesting to consider the Stormlord - he didn’t know her, just that someone new was praying to him. Testing her seemed like the natural next step.  
> The Ikithon Trio had, at this point, been recruited - I don’t actually know what that looks like, if Trent took them out of the Academy entirely or if this was like a summer internship. (You know, if they had those for like... torture and indoctrination etc.) I’m pretty happy with how this installment worked out, writing about each of these characters is making me think about them more and that’s really fun.  
> Next time: I’m thinking the order is going to be Jester, then Fjord, then Caleb for the end.   
> Let me know what you think of this fic so far! I really appreciate the comments I’ve gotten so far, and I’m curious how people feel these stories are going. If you like them, let me know :)


	4. think not of loss, but a new way to win

  On her person, Jester has: some shards of crystal from the geode they’d traveled through, several rolls of bandages, her magic paints, all her coin, her shield and axe and armor and clothing, her sketchbook and inks, her mother’s perfume, and the symbol of the Traveler. She remembers snippets, recalls the dodecahedron vibrating in her hands and cracking like a weird egg, the exclamations of the group as the tunnel filled with light, her vision whiting out and everything going away. 

  It feels like waking from a deep sleep, when she opens her eyes and takes in the sight of the docks, shadowed and dark in the night. She’s in Nicodranas, she knows, smells it on the breeze - it’s her home, of  _ course  _ she knows it. That knowledge has her picking herself up off the ground and ducking into the space between two buildings, pulling up the hood of her cloak. That’s when she realizes that the haversack is gone. And that’s when she realizes she’s completely alone.

  “Fjord? Beau? Everyone?” she calls softly, already a little anxious. “Nugget?”

  The sounds of the waves and the wind are the only answer. 

  “Traveler?”

\---

  She pulls on a half-elven face, dark hair and eyes and a sultry tilt to her brow, a little bit of Avantika’s suggestive tone and some of Fjord at his most charismatic twisting together to give this clever face a story. Just arrived in town, maybe, maybe she’s a merchant -  _ ooh,  _ or a wandering artist, looking to paint portraits in the city. Just a Jester with the confidence to get through any situation, a woman with the courage to travel far from home seeking her fortune. 

  (The confidence is a lie, the seductive voice another, but the winks she gives the innkeeper enforce both parts of the character. And it’s not like she’s mean about the ruse or anything - next time she won’t be someone people like so much. She’ll be friendly but less approachable; more like Yasha. Stoic. Quiet. It won’t hurt anyone if that’s the lie she tells.)

  The innkeeper is a pleasant individual, happy to rent her a room at their establishment despite the late hour. When Jester asks the time, they tell her that sunrise is is around three hours. She gives a quick thanks for the information and heads up the stairs to the room, locks herself in, and slides down the wall to sit on the floor.

  The disguise spell fades and Jester puts her face in her hands and just. And just. She breathes, okay, because she’s alone and that’s what you do when you’re alone, you keep breathing and you keep fighting and you make it back to your friends even if you have to go through a dragon to get to them.

  “Traveler,  _ please,”  _ she manages through her quick breaths, close to tears. “I’m all alone.”

  A flash of green fabric catches her eye, farther into the simple room. Sitting on the edge of her bed, a familiar hooded figure cocks his head at her. Faintly glowing eyes watch her from under the shadow of his cloak, evaluating her like it’s the first time, like he’s never seen her before.

  “I’m not sure I know any wandering artists,” he says in a distant voice, “but I’m curious how one knows me.”

  “I don’t know if that’s very funny, Traveler. I thought it was a good story, since I  _ am  _ a very good painter. Like in Zadash, remember?” In the back of her mind, where she keeps the detective part of herself, pieces are beginning to fit together. She digs her sketchbook out of her side pouch and flips it open, crossing the room and showing him her latest drawings.

  The Traveler watches her with his verdant eyes, gently turning the pages of her sketchbook as if it is a thing of great value. As if someone’s put a whole new treasure in his hands, or she’s just come up with a new trick, something  _ really  _ great. He reaches a page with a sketch of Momma, captured in careful detail on the cart ride away from Nicodranas, and stops. A grin curls across his face slowly, familiar but different - she’s never seen him look quite this pleased before.

  “Jester?” her god asks, interest and something like wonder thrumming through the name. 

  Relief crashes into her like a runaway cart, but something still doesn’t quite fit.

  “Remember, in Zadash? I did that both times we were there.” 

  “Jester,” her name is comforting coming from his mouth, “I don’t think you’ve ever been to Zadash. I’ve never known you to go far from the Lavish Chateau.” 

  She laughs, a little uncertain. “I’ve been pretty far from there for a little while, Traveler. We’re going to Xhorhas, remember? To find Nott’s husband? There’s that huge worm tunnel, and the fire giants, and the place I made your new shrine, and the big geode we slept in.”

  “That sounds interesting, Jester. Want to tell me about it?”

  She takes a step back, uneasy. In her pocket, Jester’s left hand clenches around one of the crystal shards she’d taken from the geode. Something is wrong. Something is wrong with this picture, with the Traveler’s careful hands on her sketchbook, with him not talking about Zadash or mentioning the zenith or her friends.

  “Weren’t you listening when I did?”

  “I always listen to you, Jester,” the Traveler says with that same interest, curiosity burning in his gaze. “You just haven’t told me anything like that yet.”

  “I... don’t understand.” Like solving a case, though, it’s coming together impossibly - 

  “I think you do,” he prompts.

  “You said ‘yet.’ You said I haven’t told you anything like that  _ yet, _ ” she says, crossing to the other side of the small room. It’s crazy, the thing she wants to think, but it doesn’t feel like a lie or a trick. Maybe a joke, but it’s not very funny with only the two of them here to laugh.  _ We’ve solved the case,  _ she thinks unsteadily, making her way to a chair on the other end of the room and sitting down. 

  “I’ve never seen  _ anything  _ like this,” the Traveler tells her, and it reminds her of their talk about the dodecahedron. Like it’s the very first time again.

  “Well, you  _ did  _ say that I’m your favorite,” she blurts, mind still whirling with the implications of this, with finding Fjord and Beau and Nott and Caleb and Yasha and Caduceus and Molly, with how what she thought was impossible has now become possible. She’s breathing fast again, she thinks.

  Suddenly beside her, his hand comes down gently on her shoulder. “Jester, look at me,” he says, gaze softening when she turns her face upward. “I’m glad to have my favorite here and now. This is exciting, isn’t it?”

  Jester nods, the comforting weight of his hand grounding her. “I’ll tell you everything we did,” she offers, “all about my friends and Nugget and Sprinkle and all the things that have happened.”

  “I’d enjoy hearing the tales.”

  “This way, next time I ask if you remember,” Jester continues with a smile, teacup-fragile, “you can say yes!”

\---

  They stay in Zadash for a day, two days, three; the Traveler is almost constantly at her side, listening to her talk and looking at her drawings, hearing about all of the adventures the Mighty Nein have had so far. He leaves briefly each evening, going to the Lavish Chateau to see a little blue tiefling girl who stays up in her bedroom all the time, but returns after Jester’s old bedtime to the little room on the second story of the inn. 

 ( “And you did this to him... in the  _ daytime?”  _ he asked, delighted.

  “Yes! It was so funny I couldn’t stop laughing,” she giggled. “He was  _ not  _ happy to be locked out though, and I had to run away.”)

  Eventually, once she’s told him absolutely everything, they sit in the little room at the inn and Jester tries to figure out what to do next. The Traveler seems content to watch and let her decide what would happen next - he hasn’t weighed in on which of her friends she should help first, only reminding her to be creative along the way. 

  Jester’s not really sure how to approach most of it, honestly. Fjord is at sea right now, maybe, or still in the orphanage; he could use a friend, but if he’s on a ship then there’s not much she can do but try to become its carpenter. Beau is a kid somewhere up in the Empire, and Jester doesn’t even know her last name to start looking, just knows that she wouldn’t appreciate a stranger looking into her business. Nott is married, probably, or will be married soon and as much as Jester wants to be a guest at the wedding she’s not sure how welcome she’d be. Nothing is really wrong with Nott’s life yet, either.

  Yasha is somewhere in Xhorhas with Zuala, Caduceus is in his cemetery with his family, and she doesn’t want to bother either of them. And Molly... there’s no Molly yet, ever if there’s a purple tiefling out there getting nine eyes tattooed on his body. 

  Caleb, though. Caleb’s off somewhere like Rexxentrum learning magic and hurting people and getting hurt by people, under the guidance of one person in particular. Jester even knows what Trent Ikithon looks like - she saw him at the festival in Zadash, and if she can’t help the rest of the Nein right now then she’s  _ going  _ to help Caleb. 

  She plans the murder in the way that she makes all of her plans: with enthusiasm! It starts with establishing herself as someone important, someone noble, someone with a fancy name and a bunch of money. That part doesn’t have to be  _ real,  _ she reminds herself as she gets to painting a set of fancy-looking clothes into existence. It just has to be  _ convincing.  _ She can be someone confident, someone important, someone seriously valuable if she just plays her cards right. She can be someone who is never, ever lonely.

  Lady Sapphire Lavorre from the Menagerie Coast has a  _ really  _ nice ring to it. At least, the Traveler smiled when she told him the name, and that’s all the approval she really needs. 

\---

  Lady Lavorre looks over the ballroom, the string of pearls wound in her hair and around her horns shining in the light, twisting around a metal ornament affixed by the rest of the styling. (They don’t know what the Traveler’s symbol is, here, and it looks like any other piece of silver jewelry.) Lady Lavorre is beautiful, is powerful, has the ear of half the city at this point; she’s been painting all their portraits, after all, and people love to talk to artists. Everyone wants to be a muse.

  (It was fun, actually, being an artist. Jester liked it a lot; everyone she painted  _ was  _ interesting. All of them had what it took to  _ be  _ someone’s muse, it was exciting! But Lady Lavorre was too stoic for that, too formal. These past months, she’s had to sneak out wearing different faces to have any kind of real fun in the capital.

  The Traveler thought the whole ruse was great fun; all these nobles paying outrageous amounts for portraits, while the artist was happy to make caricatures of them for free and give them away in the street.)

  Jester needs to be Lady Lavorre at her most formal, tonight. The invitation was a thank-you from some Duke or something like that and when she heard the rest of the guest list she just couldn’t refuse. The opportunity was too good and it would take  _ forever  _ to get one like this again. One where the right Archmage would be in attendance.

  His students are working the party - they’re all very charming, truly. She watches the girl she doesn’t know twist illusions in the air for a small group of nobles, and Astrid (because it  _ must  _ be Astrid) completely hides her distaste for them. The other unfamiliar one appears to be talking to some soldiers, nodding along seriously to whatever they are telling him. It’s interesting, seeing how these kids conduct themselves. They can’t be very old, maybe sixteen? Jester doesn’t know what the age of majority is in the Empire, actually, but she’s sure that none of the three are old enough to be soldier-spies yet. Trent Ikithon is damaging them, she thinks.

  Lady Lavorre would think nothing of the kind, though, as she accepts Bren’s request for a dance. He asks her things about the Coast, about how she’s finding the city in these past months, about the new cartoonist who’s taken to the streets at night. The faint discomfort she sees in his face as they dance is almost imperceptible, but she’s cheating - Jester’s got months of knowledge of Caleb’s face, of how he looks when he’s uncomfortable, of how he looks when he’s lying. He’s a little too stiff, as they move across the dancefloor. She ignores it, ignores the scars she sees when one of his cuffs rides up. Jester is a really good liar, and he probably doesn’t suspect a thing.

  Astrid treats him to a waltz, after, probably to discuss whatever important things he learned about her through their conversation. Jester watches them from the edge of the dancefloor. Caleb was right, in Hupperdook. Astrid is the better dancer. 

  When Trent Ikithon comes to stand beside her and observe the crowd, Lady Lavorre compliments their conduct.

\---

  “They’re good students, yes.” Trent hides his distaste for the party with far more success than his students do. Anyone in the Empire would assume that he was pleased and honored to be here, at this important gala.

  “A credit to their teacher,” Lady Lavorre says, some odd emotion flickering in her eyes. Her accent is strange in this room, in this city, in this side of the country. It’s a long way to the Menagerie Coast. Someone would need a reason to travel this far into the Empire.

  “A credit to their Empire,” Trent responds, as he watches her watch the dancing. A strange tiefling who showed up in the capital city just a few months ago and somehow wrangled an invitation to this party. He doesn’t believe she’s just some painter. No one in this room is who they say they are - why should she be any different. 

  His colleague who’d been slated to attend this party had bowed out at the last minute due to unexplained trouble - patrons of Lady Lavorre who displeased her often fell victim to mild inconveniences. She has powerful friends, for a foreigner so new to this city. She doesn’t make any kind of reasonable sense.

  (Jester stole the carriage wheels and hid the invitation while the Traveler did something that stained the fancy robes with an ink that wouldn’t be removed. They make a very good double act.)

  An illusory copy of Lady Lavorre suddenly flanks him, her casting smooth enough that his students don’t notice. A juvenile mistake, one he will have to correct. He doesn’t recognize the spell she’s cast, which is interesting. Lady Lavorre turns away from the ballroom, but her copy remains staring at the dancers. Trent goes to walk after her, to deal with this unsanctioned casting and find out who she works for, what her true purpose is in his Empire.

  He makes it one step before his body falls with a thud, necrotic energy eating through his brain. The duplicate behind him vanishes, hand still outstretched. The party is thrown into chaos, calls for the guards ringing out. 

  His three students look entirely lost before almost identical expressions of neutrality are fixed on their faces. They move through the panicked crowd like sharks, hunting. It’s the beginning of a very long night.

\---

  On the steps of the mansion, Jester picks up the hem of her dress and hurries out into the night, ignoring the rich color of the carpet and the fantastic carriages lining the drive. She can hear the commotion behind her, the concern Lady Lavorre would feel slipping away as a true smile blooms across her face. Caleb will be safe now, safe from the mess Trent Ikithon made of him, safe in the Empire where no bandits will shoot arrows into his chest and no dragons will threaten his door. 

  In her left ear, the Traveler is whispering,  _ good job, Jester, that will teach them. Now move, run, disappear and get out of the city. Keep going. There’s so much more to see. _

  She’s an entire two streets away from the party, wearing a whole new face by the time she hears the rumbling and feels the ground begin to shake. And the air shakes, and the moons in the sky seem to be quaking.

  Cracks appear in the ground, radiating outward from the gala and growing wider, deeper, chasing Jester as she runs. The abyss pulls what feels like the whole world in, bedrock beneath Jester crumbling away to some endless void. The disguise spell slips away from her and the Traveler’s voice in her ear goes abruptly silent.

  The darkness  _ tears  _ at Jester, at the ground and the air and the sky as absolutely everything around her  _ breaks.  _

  It hurts like nothing she’s ever felt before, the empty space, the glittering, strange strands of light that shoot through it. It hurts and she sees her whole life spreading out around her in watercolor paintings, shining against the dark, a dizzying hallucination of every choice she’s ever made until finally - nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, while Beau and Nott went at it a little more covertly, Jester went for the Most Dramatic possible way to take Trent out of the picture. I was honestly inches from making it a masquerade, which would have added nothing to the story but a powerful aesthetic. I was going to write more about how Jester is really alone in this fic, and how that’s sorta when she’s the most miserable, but that was really a downer so I didn’t dwell on it too much. The Traveler was still there for her (and THAT was its own can of worms, deciding if he would know her as a child or not know her at all yet) and she missed the m9 a lot. Like, a lot. Like, she would have become some kind of fairy godmother super-cleric in all of their lives if this plan had actually worked and not just Broken Everything.  
> I really like the idea of Jester building her disguises out of people she knows, so that headcanon kinda made it into this chapter. I like that concept for pretty much all uses of disguise spells, actually.  
> Next Time: Fjord Tjime, then Caleb for the finish.  
> i hope yall are enjoying this fic!! let me know what you think!!


	5. don't ever tell me what i can't do

  The dodecahedron was a mystery, but so were half the things they’d hauled around the continent at this point, so was Fjord himself. At least  _ he  _ didn’t suddenly shake and crack wide open, filling the worm tunnel walls with a rush of energy and light so bright it sears even through his eyelids. There is pressure bearing down on the group, as if the thing has physical presence, as if it is  _ pushing _ at them. 

  Fjord wakes, after the flood of energy crashes over him, to the sound of the sea. 

  The docks of Port Damali have this distinctive smell, he’s always thought, beyond the ocean and the general crap of the streets. There’s something deeper, something electrifying - when he was a kid, he thought it was the scent of adventure. But when Fjord opens his eyes, inhales deeply from where his face is pressed into the wood, the excitement is gone. He’s alone again, down at the docks where he used to stare at the ships. 

  “What the fuck,” he mutters to himself.

  The unanswering waves lap at the ships in port, and the unanswering moon shines down.

\---

  Someone tries to rob him - he must seem like an easy target, a single man stumbling through the alleys with a dazed look - and it doesn’t go well for the other guy. Fjord calls the falchion and slices off a hand in one smooth motion, a head in the next. Mercy is all well and good, but when somebody puts a knife to your throat the shine comes off the concept, a bit.

  (He looks at the corpse and regrets, a little, but his mind is still wrapped up in  _ Where are they - Are they alright - Should I be there - Beau was shouting something, what was she shouting -  _ some nameless cutpurse doesn’t really bother him that much.)

  Fjord lays down his own head on a pillow in a dockside inn, trying to convince himself that it wasn’t Orly that he saw downstairs, that there’s plenty of bagpipe-playing tortles in the world. It’s a wide world, there’s gotta be more than one. The alternative would be that Orly  _ doesn’t recognize him,  _ and that’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. 

  (His navigator was missing some years and some tattoos, and some scars. It couldn’t be him, just like it couldn’t be Fjord, somehow back in the Port after all this time.)

  And when he sleeps, he dreams.

\---

**Stranger,** his patron growls in the dream. Fjord hangs in the water, suspended and unable to move. A great yellow eye looks at him, through him, and his lungs burn. The breath escapes him in bubbles and again, Fjord drowns.

**Watching.**

  (An unknowing man made the oath, but it cannot be forsworn.)

\---

  Waking with a gasp, he chokes, coughs up a mess of foam and seawater. Something is very wrong, more wrong than normal. The dreams have never - sure he’s  _ drowned,  _ but he’s never been called a stranger before so that’s new. He’s not sure what it means.

  His sword comes to his hand when he calls, though, and the green glow of eldritch energy swirls around his palm when he wills it. That’s... it’s not comforting, exactly, but it’s at least familiar. He’s alone but not entirely helpless.

  Pulling on a rakish smile, he makes his way down to the ground floor and asks the inkeep a couple questions, asks the date as a joke and doesn’t show how much the answer throws him. It’s early fall, twenty-three years ago. 

  It’s distant, when he takes some food up to his room, like someone else is pulling the strings. He leaves a tip, probably. That seems like something he’d do.

  It’s... curious. It’s bad, of course, since he’s got no idea where his friends are and no clue how to get back to them, no one to trust or turn to, but still. Fjord is always curious.

\---

  The toast goes cold on the plate while he ponders.

  There’s, there’s a few things to think about. There’s Avantika and Sabian and his own captain who currently sails. He has absolutely no way to find them all on the vast waters. Doesn’t even know if he wants to find Avantika, doesn’t know if he wants to know her. Going to sea is appealing, but he doesn’t have it in him to follow a captain he doesn’t respect anymore.

  Uk’otoa doesn’t speak but Fjord remembers  **_Provoke,_ ** and his thoughts turn away from Port Damali. It’s always been a placeholder town anyway, always been something he wants to get away from, nothing like a home. Besides, he’s curious.

  There’s nothing to be done about his own ship right now, it’s long before he and Sabian are crew. He can’t help Jester, young and safe and hidden away. Beau doesn’t need him yet - he doesn’t even know if she’s been  _ born.  _ Caduceus has his family, Nott isn’t Nott yet, Yasha is off doing whatever baby Xhorhasians do, eating monsters or something - none of them need him yet. 

  Fjord’s skin itches and if he keeps it up he’ll wear a track in the floorboards from pacing. He needs to. He needs to act. Needs to leave Port Damali behind, bury it in the past and move to something new.

**_Provoke._** There is one thing he could deal with. For Caleb’s peace of mind. Trent Ikithon is somewhere out there in the Empire, doing whatever it is he does, and Fjord’s going to kill him.

  (He never stops for a moment to wonder if you can kill a man for things he hasn’t done, but even if he did - Ikithon’s an evil man. He’s probably done something by now to deserve it, and it’s not about  _ deserving,  _ anyway. It’s about protecting Caleb, about doing the one thing he can for his friends right now.)

\---

  Fjord puts on a friendly face or something close to it, with the shape of Beau’s nose sitting awkwardly on between Caleb’s cheekbones and above the gentle slope of Jester’s jawline. They let him across the border without any trouble, especially when he slips a few gold into the right sentry’s hand. 

  He does not proceed immediately to Rexxentrum; he doesn’t have an excuse to get in, and he doesn’t want to mess around without an advantage. He rides north, passes Zadash and keeps going.

  A couple things try to make trouble for him, a single rider traveling alone. They never take into account that Fjord can summon the falchion, can crack holes in reality to drag demons through, and the beasts of Wildemount are no match for that, even if he  _ is  _ alone. And he is alone indeed. 

  There’s nobody around to check his impulses. He misses having a crew, a first mate, a mercenary band that are friends-maybe-family. But he doesn’t miss fighting, he doesn’t have to miss fighting, the sword hums in his hands and Fjord comes into his own.

  (Part of it is still Molly’s sword, and part of it is his, and it is enough. It’s enough. Fjord can almost say that it’s enough, this single piece of the Mighty Nein. Can almost say that he isn’t entirely isolated, that he doesn’t ride for weeks without speaking to anyone.)

\---

  The world is trying to kill him, Fjord thinks sometimes. Sabian was proof enough of that - the world will try to kill you. If you know that, if you  _ understand _ it rightly, you figure out that some risks are worth taking, some leaps into the dark are necessary ones. The world will try to kill Fjord anyway. Taking a chance like this one is the only way to kill it back, just a little.

  (With them, it was better, because there was something to protect. It’s just Fjord now, though, and the monument he carries in his soul. He tries not to wonder what Jester and Beau and the rest would say; he’s trying  _ not _ to go mad, thank you very much.)

  He has regular dreams, sometimes, where he’s sitting in the basement of the Evening Nip and Molly is freshly-buried, snuffed out like a fucking candle chasing after him and Jester and Yasha. Caduceus at the bar with Jester, Jester dancing in the periphery. Nott drinking on the Gentleman’s dime. Caleb and Beau at the table, telling him not to blame himself. The snap of the sails on Vandran’s ship in the distance, calling him up out of the tavern, onto the deck with the breeze blowing at his hair.

  “Fjord, son,” his captain says, “if you’re gonna do somethin’ now, just do it.”

  The heavy mists of Labenda Swamp cling to his armor as he walks purposefully into the uncertain.

\---

  Labenda Swamp is a swamp and it’s pretty awful, actually, but the Gentleman’s shipping operation believes him when he drops a line about the Evening Nip. It’s enough to get him into the smugglers’ base, which is enough for him to find a weak place in the wall, which is enough for him to break through it. 

  Fjord steps into the merrow cavern, and he’s tearing through them, and he’s taking up the orb and shoving it into his chest. This time, he doesn’t see Vandran at all, finds himself floating in a dark pit of water once more. Somewhere so deep no light can touch it.

**Thief,** the water reverberates with the low voice.  **Punish.**

  “It’s mine,” he dares to say. “It’s mine.” He means everything, the falchion and the sphere and the magic that twists around his bones, and the weight of the dreams and the heaviness of his soul.

  The sea flays his skin away, he sees from an outside perspective, and he turns to a mess of flesh and muscle, to a skeleton that drifts down into the fathomless dark.

 The ocean growls around him, and the water is shadow and scale, sliding over itself, a mosaic of eyelids and three empty sockets.They stare at him, or not-him, whatever a person is once you strip away the blood and bone. Uk’otoa is a god-beast, is a betraying thing, is the monster at the edges of the map - Fjord dies again.  But he wakes up.

**Potential.**

\---

  Fjord gets around to making trouble in the Empire, asking inconvenient questions loudly, feeding a bit of revolutionary sentiment here and there. He remembers Caleb and Beau’s bitterness about the state of their nation and he uses that, already present years in the past. That kind of thing doesn’t just come from nowhere and he spends the winter and spring moving between villages and listening to weary complaints on taxation and wrongfully seized goods until he knows just how to pace the arguments, until he’s familiar with how these meetings beneath taverns will go.

  He picks up a longsword along the way, but for this he never has to use it.

  Fjord’s not a revolutionary - this isn’t even his country. People don’t ask him to lead some kind of cause, and they’re years away from some kind of meaningful change. The time it takes for word to spread alone would make it difficult. 

  (He wonders what Beau would think, though, wonders how she would respond to all the talk about systems and corruption. She might not take part, but if she did - she’d mean it. That was the thing about Beau; she could lie when it mattered, but it was her sincerity that was dangerous. 

_ Fuck,  _ he misses the Mighty Nein.)

  He makes himself known, though, known enough for people to watch him. Known enough to be a nuisance, difficult to catch because of his disguises. He leaves a trail partially because he’s not exactly trained in covering his tracks and partially because he wants to be found.

  The spring bleeds into the summer, and the resentment of the people bubbles up. It was a bad winter, and the weather hasn’t been particularly good the past spring, not enough rain. Nobody’s starving  _ yet,  _ but the thought is not as distant as folks would like it to be.

  When people gather to drink and complain a little too loudly, there Fjord is, nodding along and asking just what, exactly, the leadership is going to do about this. How are you, your children, your neighbors - how are you going to be taken care of?

  (The Mighty Nein were competent individually, but as a group they became  _ dangerous.  _ That’s how a crew works. That’s what groups of people with common goals are.)

  It’s only a matter of time before someone up on high takes an interest in what he’s doing.

\--- 

  It’s high summer by the time they take him, snatch him up from the streets of Zadash and haul him down to some room below the Hall of Erudition.

  That’s when it  _ really  _ sinks in, just how early this is, because Caleb is only a boy. Look, Fjord was a sailor and before that he was an orphan, he knows how fast a kid can grow up when it needs doing, but the oldest in the trio, the girl, even she can’t be more than thirteen.

  (He hadn’t expected to see Caleb at all, really, because he’s so young. Guess the Empire trains their kids to be torturers pretty early.)

  In the interrogation room Fjord throws back his head and laughs, loud, lets the light catch on his tusks and lets the accent slip away - and he calls out, daring, captain of a ship that does not yet exist, he calls for the Archmage to show his face. It’s a better lesson for the kids, if they can learn from a master.

\---

  The way Trent Ikithon looks at him is the way the spider watches the fly, is the way Avantika looked when she thought he couldn’t see, is cunning defined. A different man might be afraid of this. Maybe he should be.

  Worse things have happened to Fjord than this man, though, happen every damn near every time he closes his eyes - Trent Ikithon fucking  _ wishes  _ he was as scary as the shit Fjord sees. 

  So Fjord does what he does, and baits a dragon one line at a time, and Ikithon thinks he’s playing the prisoner so well that he doesn’t see the prisoner playing him back, doesn’t see the way the stakes are set, doesn’t know that Fjord is unafraid to risk it all. Is unafraid to win it all.

  It’s the performance of a lifetime, really, to get Trent Ikithon to stand still and talk a foot away from you, completely assured of his own power.

\---

  There’s a lot Fjord doesn’t know about himself, a lot he doesn’t understand about Uk’otoa. That’s usually a problem. This time, it’s a solution - the runes on his chains work for regular magic, could probably keep Caleb pretty out of luck if he tried to cast in here. 

  (Caleb’s magic came from study, from his mind, but Fjord’s is blood and bone and something more enduring and more terrifying.)

  Fjord carries his weapon in his  _ soul _ , something none of these fine folks took into account. The falchion sings in his hands as he moves forward in one smooth strike and takes his interrogator’s head. 

  The corpse of Trent Ikithon falls, two thumps, just like any other body would.

\---

  Everything in the room (which is to say, Fjord and the falchion and the chains rattling at his wrists) suddenly slows  _ down.  _ The flames in the torch on the wall flicker oddly, not as fast as they should be, until instead of an unsteady light there are just long periods of dimness and brightness. Even Fjord’s breathing is slow, dragging out in long inhales and exhales. 

  The dim room wavers oddly at the edges of his vision as he fumbles with the shackles, hands moving slower and slower. He frees his hands and the metal takes an age to fall, hangs in the air behind him as he walks with great effort to the door.

  What feels like fifteen minutes passes as he crosses the interrogation room. Fjord gets a hand on the handle and pushes.

  The door opens and he steps forward into a void of black nothing, threads like stars criss-crossing a nonexistent horizon. Fjord is falling, is dying, and the world shudders and eats itself until - nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fjord: I’m just gonna do my thing, poke a couple hornet nests, get some Empire attention  
> Fjord: *accidentally almost starts a revolution*  
> That’s that classic m9 escalation.  
> In all seriousness, even as I was writing I realized how reliant on luck this plan was. The fact that they didn’t just kill him immediately? A gamble. High risk high reward, that’s how Fjord was playing this one. I hope it didn’t seem like Fjord is a bad dude? He’s a good man in some truly Wild Circumstances, doing his best. (There’s also a level of understanding of his patron that he has in Xhorhas that he just... doesn’t have yet at this time? These are set before anything in Xhorhas so idk if Uk’otoa had even used the word Punish at that point.) (also yes magic dampening would work on warlock magic but just... it’s The Fiction just go with it.)  
> Next Time: Caleb, attempting to fix a mistake as best he can.   
> If you like these oneshots, let me know!! I love comments :)


	6. there is literally no way to move forward from this point

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I tagged this fic as “not the angst and time travel you were thinking of” but this chapter actually might be what you were thinking of. Caleb-typical angst.

   The dodecahedron shatters in his hands and for a brief second Caleb exists in both the shadowed tunnel with his friends and in the object itself, tangled up in threads of light that knot at his wrists and elbows and knuckles. There is none of the peace that he initially felt, curled next to the skeleton in the Zadash basement. There is only the strange dual sensation, his mind racing to interpret the magics shifting around the Mighty Nein.

   He is aware that there is a wave of light and energy and power crashing down - in the periphery he can hear his friends shouting. In the dark of the underground, he can do nothing but let it sweep over them. There is nothing to reach for - the light cracks outward faster than he can respond and he finds himself the epicenter of some new disaster. Within, though, in the place where he has become most familiar with the dodecahedron, in the place he has studied more than the others...

   (A wizard is not confined to paper and ink and scholarship. What you learn, when you learn magic, is a new way to think. You focus. You have intent. Caleb is, in spite of his own opinions, a very fine wizard. He acts always with intent.

   It makes a difference.)

   The trappings of starlight and fate and time sizzle against his skin, newly-unbandaged, and he  _ yanks. _

\---

   Caleb wakes facedown in mud that squelches against the side of his face. This is not entirely unusual. He feels weak, shaken,  _ exhausted.  _ When he tries to stand, pushing against the ground, all of the joints in his arms come alive with searing pain and he falls back to the ground with a gasp. He can smell, under the thick scent of mud, something burnt. 

   He tries to form a spell but his mouth loses the shape of the invocation and his hands are too heavy to lift for the gestures. Weariness drags him into oblivion.

   There are voices speaking above him, indistinct. He catches only a fragment of the sound. 

   “  —and I’ll get his shoulders, ready?”

   There is the sensation of movement, but his mind is slow and his arms are burning and even his paranoia cannot drag him back to wakefulness. 

\---

   Caleb is cold, is sick and shivering and alone. He hallucinates the smell of the salve his mother used for burns and feels nearly disconnected from the world. When he tries to wake his eyelids are impossibly heavy, his arms stiff and hardly responding, his mind stretched so thin it threatens to tear.

   (The first lesson he’d learned all those years ago at the Soltryce Academy had been in the form of a cautionary tale. Sometimes, when your reach exceeds your grasp, when the spell builds beyond your control, there are consequences. A rebound.)

   Somewhere, someone wipes a damp cloth across his forehead.

\---

   Time is moving strangely, and he dreams. 

   Some are brief: Nott pats his hand in the back of the wagon, Fjord clasps his shoulder on the deck of Avantika’s ship, Jester tucks him into bed in Hupperdook. Astrid smiles in a rare moment of gentleness. He floats in the sea, naked but for the weight of his amulet, and listens to a distant gull give an indignant cry.

   Some of the dreams are more drawn out, each stretching for an age. Caduceus sets teacups out among the graves and they steam for several quiet hours, the sun never moving across the sky. At the bottom of the sea Beauregard slumps against his shoulder and they watch the seaweed waver above the hidden temple, Fjord somewhere within. Yasha stands in the doorway, silhouetted by sunlight that glints against her sword and glows in the white of her hair, a bulwark against danger. It feels like a season passes but she does not waver even once, even when he croaks her name in his ragged celestial.

   He thinks he hears his father singing, rumbling along across some great distance. An old song, one to drive away bad dreams. The words escape him, caught up in sickness and exhaustion as he is, but he feels... safe.

   (It has been such a long time since Caleb Widogast has felt safe.)

\---

   When he wakes there’s soup bubbling over the fire and someone has cleaned his face and bandaged his hands. He manages a snap, fingers shaking with the effort, and Frumpkin curls under his chin. The house is... not unfamiliar.

   He is laying in the central room on a clean pallet of straw, a sturdily-woven blanket tucked around him. For a makeshift bed he’s entirely comfortable, and despite just waking up he is still tired. He looks to the window already knowing that it is evening, already knowing how the sky is painted sunset-purple over the fields. 

   The front door opens, top hinge squeaking as it always did, and his mother walks in with a bucket of water. She does not drop it in surprise but her eyebrows raise when she sees him awake, and she sets the bucket down next to their stove before coming to kneel at his side. 

   (This is madness, it is madness it is madness it is _ madness _ but Caleb has been mad before and it did not feel like this. Frumpkin bumps his head against Caleb’s chin.)

   “Got a friend there, have you?” She smiles and carefully runs a hand down Frumpkin’s spine. The cat, pleased as ever with attention, courteously sniffs her.

   “Ah, yes,” Caleb manages with a weak smile. “I’m good with cats.”

   His mother lets the silence settle for a moment before offering, “My name is Una Ermendrud. You’re in my family’s home. We found you out on the edge of our field, looking pretty rough.”

   “I’m Caleb,” and he lies to her, of course he does, “and I’m not sure how I got there, Mistress Ermendrud.”

   “Call me Una, Caleb, and when my husband Leofric comes in just call him Leofric. We don’t keep fancy titles around here.” She stands, moving back to the soup and giving it a few stirs before looking back to him. “If you’re feeling up to it, you could use some dinner. It’s been a while since we pulled you out of the mud, and you’re a pretty thin man.”

   “I don’t, I don’t want to impose on you any longer-”

   “Don’t be ridiculous,” his mother says firmly, “we could use some new dinner conversation.”

\---

   Una and Leofric instruct him to stay, at least while he regains his strength. His father puts soup in a mug when the spoon shakes in his hands and it is an entirely surreal meal. It feels real, and the hot broth burns his mouth the first time he drinks too fast, hiding a reaction to the way his parents look at each other, breathing and alive.

   He protests but it lacks heart, and the couple decides to tell neighbors he’s Una’s cousin, come out from one of the cities for some fresh air. He looks like her, Caleb realizes, around his eyes and in the shape of his mouth he looks a great deal like his mother.

   (“If you’re some stranger we found in the field,” his father says, “we’ll get all kinds of gawkers from town. Now, the Crownsguard in Blumenthal are, well, they’re decent people but they’ve got no sense of the privacy a recovering person needs.”

   “I’ve always wanted another cousin,” his mother jumps in, clearly recognizing that he won’t respond with a mouthful of soup.)

   So he decides to stay, at least for the night.

\---

   He allows himself a day, which turns into two, then three, then a week. Then two weeks. Each morning he wakes deciding that  _ today  _ is the day he leaves, and each morning he finds himself going out to work the field with his parents or turning the pages of one of their battered novels or slipping one of his coins into the household funds, cleverly hidden in the jar behind the turnip sack in the cellar. Caleb doesn’t have much in the way of coin, not at the rate he spends it on paper and ink and incense, but he has to at least  _ try  _ to make up for his presence in their home. Frumpkin lazes in the windowsill and establishes his place at the top of the hierarchy of farm cats.

   There’s a whole new world of paths stretching out before Caleb, and the world can be anything now but he still spends the evening talking to his father about time spent in the military or grinding wheat into flour for his mother. It’s wonderful to hear their voices and watch them work and talk and walk around. 

   ( _ Oh,  _ Bren had been a fool not to appreciate that. He’s not sure what might happen if he meets the son they are so proud of, not sure if the universe will fall apart or if he will be unable to contain his fury at the confident, arrogant boy. He is fifteen now, they tell Caleb with smiles. He is fifteen and he will do great things.)

   Caleb helps with the farming and is slowly introduced to the neighbors and every morning he wakes in a world where his parents are living people and it’s not enough. It’s horrible to think it, late in the night when Frumpkin sleeps pressed against his shoulder, but it’s not enough. For Caleb, it is not enough of a victory to be in a world with living parents. 

   (He is a fine wizard. He acts always with intent. He will only be satisfied if he can unmurder them, if he can take the date of their deaths and crack it in two, if he can save them from his sins.)

   So in the middle of the third week, he accepts a small loaf of bread from his parents and sets off down the road. 

\---

   Caleb, frankly, does not know how to exist in the past. Despite his long-term plans, years of regret and hatred and terrible hope, he finds himself untethered from the people around him. It’s like there’s a wall between him and the world, one he can’t quite overcome. Frumpkin curls up under his chin at night, purring steadily to drown out the sound of the temporary allies he’s made for some coin, but the sound doesn’t soothe him.

   He can’t help but think that one of the others would be better suited to this sudden uprooting. Fjord could adapt quickly and so could Beauregard, with the right motivation - that had been clear in their time with Avantika. Jester and Caduceus and Yasha could all consult their higher powers for guidance, for some indication that they were on the right path. And Nott was just, just  _ better  _ at this than him, better at ingratiating herself with people and accumulating coin and all the business of being alive. But it’s just him, now, just Caleb and his books and an impossible enemy. (He wonders if Twiggy felt this way, alone with a crossbow and a dragon. This strange mixture of resignation and fear. He can’t imagine her being afraid of anything.)

   Right now, Bren is busy losing his head over Astrid’s evocation spells or getting into scrapes with Eodwulf. He hasn’t gained the attention of any Archmage - he’s a bright student, but not a force of nature. And to kill Trent Ikithon, one would have to be a force of nature.

   Still, he murders his parents in less than two years, so Caleb will need to become very dangerous, very quickly.

   Luckily, the circumstances are not entirely unkind to an unattached wizard.

\---

   Tensions are at a rare level between the King and the Cerberus Assembly - without something to unite the Empire, it threatens to tear itself apart. King Bertrand Dwendal is wary of the Archmages as a matter of principle, but his hands are tied. 

   At least, that’s what Caleb gleans from an overworked clerk in a tavern in Rexxentrum. Three hundred years since the war of mages in the streets of the city, a city that has now become the centerpiece of Assembly power, and friction still exists between the denizens. Nothing you’d see as a tourist, the clerk assures him, but old De'leth was around when all that business happened and  _ some  _ city residents haven’t forgotten it.

   “Y’see, the old king, his rest be peaceful and all, but the king that started the whole  _ arrangement,”  _ and here his drinking partner’s voice dips into outright derision, “he didn’t even put the mages in prison, just had them swear their service and they got off with a slap on the wrist. My ma says her gran (she’s an elf, see, and she’s got a long memory) says there was blood in the  _ streets _ , says the skyline was close to burning. But the king had them swear, and he trusted them, and now look where we are. Filing requests to the Soltryce Academy all day, can’t even get a representative to consult on imperial matters. It’s a mess, is what it is.” 

   And who is Caleb to ignore an opportunity to consult on a minor imperial matter like that, who is Caleb to ignore a new friend in need of help. He says the right things, adds the right flattery and shows the right competence, and in the morning they go to the office and he identifies a few arcane glyphs for a very grateful bureaucrat.

\---

   That’s how it begins, with a lucky stop in a tavern. At least, that’s the story he tells at lunch meetings and dinner parties. And how wonderful the Empire is, that a coincidence like that could happen, that a loyal citizen could rise from obscurity into a life of exemplary service to the crown. It starts with that favor, which becomes a steady trickle of low-paying consulting jobs, which brings him into the fold of government.

   (Caleb is a wizard. He acts always with intent. None of this has been the happy accident he portrays it as - every favor traded, every  _ scrap _ of information and magic gained has been the result of careful planning and seized opportunities.) 

   There is no political position for a wizard outside of the Cerberus Assembly. At least, there are no positions that are about  _ being  _ a mage the way there are within the Assembly. Mages on the inside are sworn to King Dwendal, of course, and work to promote the interests of the Empire - but they are very much  _ within  _ the Assembly. It is generally understood that, in these divided times, the King does not wish to force a choice between loyalty to himself and loyalty to their fellow mages. The cleanup of such a moment would be messy.

   Caleb, however, has no ties to the Cerberus Assembly. He has no ties at all, really, beyond a few farmers in Blumenthal that are well-known to be loyal citizens. And he has worked to make himself very useful in the lower tiers of government, generally well-liked by Rexxentrum residents and visiting soldiers. He never forgets a name and never fails at his tasks, mundane as they may be.

   When his King requests something of him, he does not hesitate. He acts deliberately, spies carefully, and kills when it becomes necessary. 

   (Caleb, first in a room in an inn and then in the spare room of a scribe and then in a room in the palace of his king, reads and paces and counts the days. He accumulates knowledge and blood under his nails, gets ink on his face and starts using Avantika’s elaborate code to keep his notes, desperate to keep them secure. He makes himself useful, because he needs to get into libraries and archaeological sites and the word of a monarch opens doors that would be entirely closed to a man who lacks history and prestige.

   It is good that he is not  _ Vollstrecker, _ that he is rarely asked to kill and more often asked to sit in on meetings between representatives of the Assembly and representatives of the crown and record what secrets he feels are passing unspoken between attendees. 

   Caleb is a murderer and plans a murder, he hones his focus and makes deadly his intent. He studies half-destroyed glyphs and the remnants of dead empires and every day the noose tightens around his neck a little bit more, as the day a boy kills his family draws nearer.)

   It takes one month, two, a  _ year  _ of avoiding recruitment into the Soltryce Academy and displaying a fondness for teaching for the invitation to arrive. The Academy has entertained guest lecturers before, and would be happy to do so again if Caleb Widogast would like to give a talk.

   Caleb Widogast, a human who came from nowhere and has somehow become a political figure with some small scrap of influence on magic in the court of Rexxentrum, humbly accepts.

   (He decides to lecture on fire, and when he is alone he is violently ill. Frumpkin leans against his shaking form silently as he  _ doesn’t think  _ about what Nott and Jester and Beauregard and Fjord and Yasha and Caduceus would say, if they knew what he’d done to get here.)

\---

   Trent Ikithon, Archmage of Civil Influence for the Cerberus Assembly, watches Caleb Widogast sweep his gaze over the class in the Soltryce Academy. Stretched between the man’s hands is a stream of fire, caught like a living thing, twitching an animal in a trap. Widogast references a text from the Age of Arcanum at one point, and Trent wonders just how he got access to it. Texts like that one, dangerous texts, are a finite resource. It could be useful to know which courtier had it in their library.

   This man is dangerous, he realizes, as Widogast twists his hands and the fire forms into a dragon that screeches in the large hall, as the students applaud the end of the lecture with more enthusiasm than most teachers receive. Trent knows what loyalty looks like, and despite the introductions, the position as the King’s advisor, the performance of the man before him - Widogast feels nothing at all for the Empire.

   (In this world, in any world, Trent has always been able to see through him.)

   They share a drink in his office after the lecture, as a gesture of welcome. The Soltryce Academy is happy to have someone like Widogast give as many lectures as he likes. The point about Arcanum-age fire glyphs was particularly interesting, as was the manipulation of the flame itself. Widogast laughs the dragon off as a party trick, but the Archmage knows power, knows potential, and sees an unnerving amount of both in the man raising a glass to his lips.

   Trent Ikithon turns a copper piece in the hand below his desk and dips into Widogast’s surface thoughts. They’re a mess of information - dates and arcane theory and thoughts on various schools of magic but it all suddenly becomes clear when he says “What do you want, Mister Widogast?”

_    This moment. _

   Caleb finishes the drink and stands up, twists his hands in a motion that hasn’t seen daylight since the end of the Calamity, and punches a spear of pure and living fire through Trent Ikithon’s chest. The fire burns and shudders and flows through the man, starved and finally consuming after hundreds of years of neglect. A weapon strong enough to reduce a village to ash and glass, and he uses it to kill a single man.

\---

   Outside the office, the sun vanishes from the sky. Cold sweeps across the world and in an instant everything enters into deep darkness, the sky freezing into something brittle and impossible. Then it shatters, showing a glimpse of an endless web of strings and threads and choices made and not made and Caleb’s arms and wrists and fingers burn, are burning, will burn, were always on fire. But Trent Ikithon is dead before him and there is a void yawning up to greet him anyway.

   Caleb does not exist long enough for the taste of victory to sour on his tongue, for it to meet and mingle with the rot of his soul.

   The world goes away. The universe corrects itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Caleb in this fic is pre-Xhorhas, which was a little difficult to capture? He’s had /so much/ character development since they entered Xhorhas and like... has hope for things now, even if he doesn’t realize it. The Caleb in this fic doesn’t have that - he knows that he is alone and terrible and doesn’t hesitate to join up with a faction that is far from benevolent (i do not trust. The empire. Or the krynn tbh but that’s not in this fic.) if it gets him to his goal. I hope this doesn’t read as clumsy, the idea that he just traded enough favors and studied for a solid year and somehow managed to become Someone Important To The Empire. If it seems like a really fast ascent (which it does to me? A little bit?) i don’t really have a good answer for it. I didn’t want to write another thousand words of Empire Political Conversations so he just. Is really successful and good at levelling up. (And he is just absolutely miserable the entire time without the m9, but i also didn’t want to write another couple hundred words of caleb just Being Sad. sprinkle that in where you like i guess) (it was also a choice on my part to have him think less about them than they did about him/the others, not because he doesn’t care about them at all but because pre-Xhorhas i think he’d be way less likely to admit to the regard he has for them)  
> Overall thoughts! I really like how this fic turned out, it was fun to explore how different members of the m9 might handle a pretty random time jump. The whole “trent ikithon is the awful lynchpin of the universe” thing gives him more importance than I like, because I hate him, but the destruction of the universe was a very useful way to avoid the larger ripples that his death would cause, and I wasn’t really interested in writing an entire AU where a key political figure died at six different points. (In case there’s any confusion re:the timelines, basically each of these chapters are separate timelines that all end in the universe tearing itself apart because of just. Paradoxes I guess? I’m not a time scholar. What I’m trying to tell you is that trying to go back in time and stop something from happening does not work in this fic, which you probably already guessed.)  
> Please let me know what YOU think! Leave a comment! Let me know what your favorite chapter/scene/moment in the fic was! I’m really happy that I finished it, and I hope you enjoyed reading it!


End file.
